Silverstein's 'The Giving Tree' celebrates 40 years in print

Love leaves scars. Love can destroy you. Love can survive the loss of every sweet hope -- even the hope for gratitude.

These are some of the bitter lessons of "The Giving Tree," Shel Silverstein's classic fairy tale, which this year marks its 40th birthday. It's the story of a motherly apple tree and a selfish, driven boy who takes her fruit, her limbs, finally all she has.

The tale is spare as haiku, starkly drawn. It makes parents sniffle and educators squirm. It's a children's story that baffles children as much as it fascinates them.

And like every children's classic worthy of the name, it gives off a glow that illuminates and burns.

The book was given to many mothers for Mother's Day. It also appears at birthdays, weddings and baby showers. It is, yes, an evergreen -- one of the bestselling children's books of all time.

By the end of 2000, 5.6 million copies had been sold since its 1964 debut. And it's still going strong: Last year, 286,000 copies went home in their apple-green dustcovers, ranking it at No. 14 for 2003 on Publishers Weekly's "back list" for hardcover children's books. Those are the immortals like Beatrix Potter and Dr. Seuss.

And so his tree lives on:

But time went by. And the boy grew older. And the tree was often alone.

Silverstein's parable is powerful because of what goes unsaid. Neither the reader nor the tree sees what happens to this boy as he grows up and moves out into the world, turning his back on games of hide-and-seek and the tender moments of childhood. He merely returns with his demands: money. A house. Freedom.

He is adrift and the tree is rooted, unable to follow. Her branches droop. But she tries to make him happy in the world he's chosen.

And the tree was happy ... but not really.

Many readers are unhappy, too. To them, "The Giving Tree" is "overrated." It's not nice enough to share shelf space with "Pat the Bunny" and "Goodnight Moon." They feel stung by its irony and betrayed by the lack of a neat, sweet moral. To many of them a children's book is a jar of strained apricots: nothing upsetting, nothing distasteful.

A few people are convinced the book was an outright prank played on moms and dads, like Silverstein's "Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book," which encouraged kids to feed sugar lumps to the pony in Daddy's gas tank.

And "The Giving Tree" simply angers many parents. If it's a joke, it's a bad one. It doesn't go where it should. There are dissatisfied readers who say it encourages ingratitude -- even deforestation.

Or even worse subversion? A Chronicle of Higher Education article once related how art historian Ellen Handler Spitz, offering a common academic critique of the book, condemned it as, in the reporter's words, "a celebration of male selfishness and female self-abnegation."

Celebration? Finding celebration in this well of sorrow is quite a feat. Especially sexist gloating. If ever there were an equal-opportunity heartbreaker, this is it. Dads like me weep over it just as much as our wives do.

If "The Giving Tree" doesn't celebrate sexism, if it's not about the Earth Mother, if it's not singsong wholesomeness in the style of "Barney and Friends," what is it? What does it say?

We can start, of course, at "Honor your mother." But honor her with a rare gift, the truth.